Why it’s not surprising that young men are abandoning college
The recent surge in stories about young men abandoning higher education — college women outnumber men 3 to 2 — may have surprised a few headline writers, but the graffiti about the decline of men and boys has been on the wall for decades.
We’re merely seeing the culmination of 50 years of feminist advances combined with economic shifts that have left men unemployed and socially sidelined. Early warning signs were clear in the 1990s when men began organizing — a disconsonant concept, I admit — around grievances about divorce and subsequent custody battles. Fathers were feeling increasingly displaced by child-custody arrangements that often “repurposed” fathers as weekend visitors in their children’s lives.
“Trickle down” may not work in economics but it sure does in society and culture. The lesser regard for men’s interests was also manifesting among youngeraged males as girl power seized the public imagination. School curriculums were being adjusted to become more go-girl and less boy-centric.
In practice, this meant a growing intolerance toward boy behavior in general; complaints that they couldn’t sit still in school like the girls; and an epidemic of ADHD diagnoses and medication of children, mostly of boys (11.7% male to 5.7% female, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Just ask any mom with a son born in the past 25 to 30 years: Boys became suspect, wrong from the start. Or, as I began my 2008 book, “Save the Males,” quoting a then-10-year-old boy: “Men bad, women good.”
School reading lists were suddenly missing books about heroes, chivalry, knights and other such symbols of boyhood fantasy, while girls were embracing female heroes (we don’t say “heroine” anymore) and fantasizing about becoming Supreme Court justices and fighter pilots. “Girl power,” first introduced in 1991 by punk band Bikini Kill, had become a household phrase by the time Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls” became a bestseller. Pipher, a psychologist, highlighted the challenges modern girls and teens faced with both a “lookist,” girldestroying culture and culture shot through with sexual violence, resulting in eating disorders and suicide attempts.
While correcting the cultural deficits and opportunities for girls was a grand mission that wouldn’t have gained traction without the relentless activism of feminist-minded women — and men — we sometimes veered into zero-sum territory. If girls were to succeed, boys would sometimes lose and, well, too bad. Hadn’t they had the upper hand long enough? This was no one’s stated aim, I’m pretty sure, but it became difficult to ignore trends aimed at diminishing the value of men and, collaterally, boys.
By 2000, the first books appeared cataloguing feminism’s unintended consequences. While girls were catching the waves, boys were treading water. Among them were “The War on Boys,” by Christina Hoff Sommers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys,” by child psychologists Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon. By 2007, Kindlon had written another book: “Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World,” based on his observations of his own daughters and statistics such as the ones that began this column.
Girls born since 1980, he said, are different from their mothers. They suffer no delusion that they are the second sex or, laughably, the weaker sex. They’re handson-hips Superwomen wondering, as New York Times writer Maureen Dowd did in her 2005 book, “Are Men Necessary?”
Given the above, why would young men bother going to the trouble and expense of college? And they won’t if we don’t start making our boys feel as valuable as our girls. As Thompson recently noted, “We can’t have a country of women in white-collar jobs and men in blue-collar jobs. That’s not going to be good for this society.”
The karmic irony is that women shopping for frozen sperm want college-educated. If trends continue, we may be joining the ivory-billed woodpecker among the extinct.